Sunday, 24 May 2015

S T E P Z: A Welcome from the Editor

I shall be taking S T E P Z to the printers on Friday. It will be available online (free) and as a limited edition hard copy by mid-June. Please click here for the overview and here for a rundown of the upcoming contributions.

Below is the welcome message from the editor:

Welcome to Stepz, the new zine for and by those interested in psychogeography and in critiquing, appreciating and debating urban space.
I started Stepz following the completion of Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography (2015). I felt there were voices that I was unable to represent therein, for various reasons. Stepz does not have the strict editorial rules applied to it that would be the case in an academic article, textbook, or even in a novel. It is, what you might call, ‘editorially restrained’.

When researching for Walking Inside Out I looked at some of the 1990s psychogeography-related zines and alternative texts (like the London Psychogeographical Association’s newsletters and Tom Vague’s ‘Wild West’ zines). These have historically been a part of psychogeography, going back to the sixties and the Situationists – for example, their 1966 pamphlet ‘On the Poverty of Student Life’. If, how I have suggested in discussions about what I’ve termed ‘the new psychogeography’, there is a current resurgence, then it needs to be marked in some way that represents an alternative mode of publication to the mainstream one.

Please note: this pilot edition is in digital and limited edition hardcopy format. While I am happy for people to circulate and copy the magazine as much as they wish, all the authors gave their creative time for free and the magazine is un-copyrighted and not run as a profit-making publication, so please keep that in mind. I have also added a hidden symbol to the hard copy version in order to track its propagation over ley lines.